College football – week 11

The four top teams remained unbeaten

Here are the complications:

* Michigan and Ohio State will match up during the regular season, so they can’t both retain a perfect record.
* When one of them loses, do they stay in the top four, or be replaced by Tennessee?
* But how can the committee select Tennessee to be among the top four in the country when they finish third in their own conference?
* How can the committee select the loser of the Michigan/OSU game to be among the top four in the country when they also finish third in their own conference? (Neither Tennessee nor the loser of the OSU/Michigan game will make their conference championship game.)
* So if it is TCU, OSU-or-Michigan and Georgia – who gets the fourth spot? Tennessee and OSU-or-Michigan seem to be eliminated by the logic above, but assuming one of them will go in, which one? ESPN’s panel of 15 experts takes Michigan by a 14-1 vote!
* #6 LSU can really complicate things in the unlikely event that they defeat Georgia in the SEC championship game, especially since they were slaughtered by Tennessee earlier in the season.
* Michigan, OSU and Tennessee are rooting for TCU to lose one, but the Horned Owls refuse to co-operate. They have won their last six games by ten points or fewer, but they always come out on the correct side of the score. Sagarin’s computer ratings suggest that those three teams (and several others) are better than TCU, but an undefeated team from a Power Five conference is going to get a bid, no questions asked, even though they may go into a Georgia playoff game as two-touchdown underdogs.